A typical document delivery system in use today is e-mail. E-mail is an efficient and popular way to communicate and, therefore, has become an important part of nearly every home, business, and institution.
During creation of an e-mail, the sender typically inserts a message and one or more addresses into the e-mail. The message may be in the form of text, graphics, and/or other forms of communication. The address takes the following form:
recipient@organization.domainextension
where the recipient is the person to receive the e-mail, and the remainder of the address is the domain name. The organization in the domain name may be an Internet Service Provider or other organization such as a business or institution, and the .domainextension portion of the domain name is usually referred to as the top level domain or sometimes the domain extension. Examples of domain extensions are .com, org, .gov, and .edu.
Remembering e-mail addresses can be a difficult task, especially for those who are uncomfortable with using computers. Most E-mail programs have address books that store e-mail addresses by the person's names, but even then such e-mail features can still be vexing to the reluctant computer user. Therefore, due to such complexities and also due to the non-intuitive nature of computer interfaces, many people are discouraged from using e-mail as a form of communication. These issues might be acceptable except that so many people have adopted e-mail as a common form of communication.
Thus, most people today use e-mail not only regularly, but also aggressively. People use it to schedule appointments, to communicate with friends and loved ones, and in the conduct of business. But there are those who do not use computers or do so only reluctantly.
Therefore, there is a need for devices that permit such people to communicate electronically.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,366,698 discloses a portable terminal that takes an image of a document (such as a handwritten document), and sends the image in a file to a host device. The user is required to provide an address on the document in a preset format. The preset format includes a command, a predetermined indicator, and a destination.
The command indicates a processing instruction to the host device. The command indicates that the document is to be transmitted by e-mail or facsimile or that any mail should be delivered electronically by the host device to the portable terminal. The predetermined indicator is used to uniquely designate the address as an address. The predetermined indicator can be underlining, brackets, or colors. The destination indicates the recipient of the document and can be a facsimile telephone number or an e-mail address.
When the host device receives a document, it determines whether the received document is e-mail or a fax. If it is either, the host device stores the received e-mail or fax using the destination as a key. If the received document is neither e-mail nor a fax, the host device executes pattern recognition to read the command, destination, and predetermined indicators on the received document. The host device determines whether the service requested by the user is e-mail or facsimile transmission. If so, the document is e-mailed or faxed to the specified destination.
It is apparent from the above description that the user is required to provide an address in a complicated and counterintuitive format. Reluctant computer users or those who do not use computers at all will not find such a system easy to use and will desire a more user-friendly terminal and service.
The present invention solves one or more of these and/or other problems.